Chinese President Xi Jinping used the opening of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) on Friday to announce the creation of the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO), a body Beijing says will coordinate global rules and shared access for artificial intelligence. Reuters reported the move as China pitching itself as the organizer of a new global AI order, stepping into a gap left by fragmented Western policy.
The pledge came at the conference's kickoff in Shanghai, held July 17-20 under the theme "Intelligent partners, co-creating the future." Xi told the assembled delegates that China will offer 5,000 spots in AI training and seminar programs to developing countries over the next five years, and he pledged open access to a set of Chinese open-source models. Xinhua carried the announcement, and Global Times published the text the same morning.
A conference that outgrew the expo hall
WAIC has grown from a city-level tech fair into one of the largest AI gatherings on the planet. Shanghai officials told a press briefing that this year's show spans more than 100,000 square meters of exhibition space for the first time, with over 1,100 enterprises and 3,000 exhibits on the floor.
More than 300 products are making their global debut in Shanghai this week. Organizers split the busiest corridors into two tracks - intelligent computing and embodied intelligence - and say more than 200 companies are clustered in each. The event runs across six segments: forums, exhibitions, awards and competitions, application experiences, innovation incubation, and talent recruitment.
The numbers signal money moving alongside the demos. The conference has already lined up 57 major application scenarios, and intended cooperation agreements reached 16.2 billion yuan (about $2.3 billion at current rates). Tang Wenkan, director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization, said multiple headline products would debut on site.
Homegrown models take the stage
Chinese labs used the keynote window to show models and hardware built at home. Tang listed the Huawei Atlas 950 supernode, described as the industry's largest-scale super node, alongside the MiniMax M3 multimodal large model and the Jieyue Agent Operating System from StepFun. Near-memory computing 3D chips and what organizers called the world's first AI Agent smartphone rounded out the debut list, with humanoid robots and AI dexterous hands shown as working gadgets rather than renderings.
The speaker roster leans on heavyweight names. Nine Turing Award and Nobel Prize recipients are attending. Richard Sutton, often called the father of reinforcement learning, delivered a keynote. Yoshua Bengio, a deep-learning pioneer, outlined the United Nations' work on AI governance. Gilles Brassard, a 2025 Turing Award winner, and Omar Yaghi, a 2025 Nobel laureate, joined sessions on the emerging AI-for-science paradigm.
Wang Peng, an associate researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, called the event a global benchmark that sets the tone for the year's AI trend. His read is that Chinese firms now lead parts of the AI supply chain, from large language models to robotics, and the conference works as a showcase for those gains.
Humanoid robots move from demos to factories
The embodied-intelligence track reflects a policy push that goes past trade-show spectacle. Gan Xiaobin, an official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said at the briefing that China's annual production of humanoid robots is expected to reach 100,000 units this year, and that the machines are already entering factories and workshops.
Manufacturing has become the main testing ground for AI-enabled tools. Gan noted that adoption of AI among China's large-scale industrial enterprises has passed 30 percent. Liu Wei, who directs the Human-Machine Interaction and Cognitive Engineering Laboratory at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, expects the conference to connect capital and real-world sites so humanoid robots reach mass production sooner.
Consumer hardware is shifting too. Wang Ruomeng, an official at the National Development and Reform Commission, said sales of AI smartphones and personal computers should pass non-AI devices for the first time in 2026. China's shipments of AI-powered smart terminals, including phones and PCs, topped 100 million units last year.
The governance play behind the gadgets
The High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance runs alongside the expo, and dozens of countries and international organizations are sending senior representatives, according to Sun Xiaobo, who coordinates AI affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The talks cover world models and AI-agent standards, the gap between nations that have AI and those that do not, fair trade across the AI supply chain, and norms for humanoid robotics and digital assets.
WAICO is the headline item. China first proposed the organization at last year's conference, and no countries had formally joined at the time. Reuters reported that this year's announcement moves it from proposal to standing body, with Beijing positioning the group as a counterweight to U.S. and European rulemaking that critics say has tilted toward export limits and closed models.
The open-source strand matters here. Liu Wei pointed out that, unlike some Western governments, China has built a homegrown open-source approach that strengthened its domestic AI base. That model, he argued, helps developing economies join the digital economy instead of buying finished tools from a few vendors.
What it means for the global race
For readers tracking the industry, the Shanghai week lands against a busy run of hardware news. TSMC posted a record quarter this month as AI demand pushed its growth past 40 percent, a sign that the buildout behind these models keeps accelerating. Our coverage of that result sits in the AI and semiconductors sections, and the robotics angle connects to our robotics and drones reporting.
The timing is no accident. Washington has tightened chip export rules while Beijing has pushed open models and training programs abroad. WAICO gives China a permanent banner under which to recruit partners, especially in the Global South, where compute and talent remain scarce.
Practically, the organization's first jobs will be procedural: setting working groups, agreeing on meeting cadence, and deciding which standards to write first. Whether WAICO gains members beyond Beijing's existing partners will decide if it shapes real rules or stays a forum. Reuters noted the announcement arrived as the U.S. approach remains split between state-level data-center limits and federal permitting pushes, leaving no single Western body to answer in kind.
The conference itself keeps the public front open through July 20. A City Walk links 24 landmarks across Shanghai under six themes, from AI science education to industrial innovation, and night programs include an AI music show and creator sessions. For the companies exhibiting, the measure of success is plain: signed deals and shipped units, not the speeches.
Xi's framing was direct. He presented China as the side offering access rather than restrictions, and WAICO as the institution to make that access real. The next twelve months will show whether other governments treat that offer as genuine cooperation or as a bid for control of the standards that will govern the next decade of artificial intelligence.
Reuters' full dispatch on the opening speech is here, and Xinhua's announcement of the organization is carried by Global Times.